Month: December 2005

3.75 by my latest reckoning before I get to run away for Christmas. I’ve suspect we are going to be sort of busy, despite my best efforts to hide away for a week or so. Ah well. Will still try to use some of my time fruitfully, going to order myself at gunpoint to do a bit of writing. Try for an hour a day. Something like that anyways. Got this sitcom idea I want to do some work on, have some groundwork done, need to expand that more, try and get some of a first episode written and fleshed out. Have quite a bit of it in my head, need to get it down on paper and make it more complete.

I have been promising myself for ages I would get this place looking slightly different, and here it is. I like it, but what do you think? Let me know if you have an opinion.

Christmas is all but sorted now, just mrsfb to sort out, and I am well on the way with that. This time last week I had barely done anything, so I get to feel slightly smug for a little bit. At least as long as it takes for Amazon to announce they have fucked up my order anyway.

Spent yesterday on an XML course, which was dull but somewhat worthy. Know I am going to end up writing a fair old bit of it. Ra ra.

Can’t explain it, but am just feeling a little more focused and positive this week. Seem to be getting my shit together, getting something approaching organised. It is a nice feeling. Ultra-busy at work, but just getting my head down and getting on with stuff. Got the christmas tree up (might take a pic of that tonight), starting to get pressies sorted, and roughly know what we are up to over Christmas. Good.

In other news, may have a trendy new 3g phone soon (free upgrade, not shelling out money, which is ideal). Don’t know how much I will get to use the video stuff, but it does have a decent camera, so hopefully this will let me get a few more pics into here. There is a mobile blogger service in the states, which would allow me to post pics and text directly, but they haven’t released it yet over here, which is barking, as we use mobiles and they don’t really understand them in the states. Not to the same extent as we europeans, where they have pervaded into daily life much more. There are many reasons for this, not least the difficulty in providing full coverage across a country the size of the states. We’re just into it much more, text in particular, but even video has taken off a lot quicker here.

Well sod it, I am thinking about these anyway. What I think I will do this year as well, is actually promise myself I will come back in a years time, and review them. And see how I did. I think I may have made some last year, let us not talk about those now. Let us look to the future.

Right, I have three simple aims for next year that are simple and achieveable. Two of them are holidays. Mrsfb and I would like two holidays, one a weekend break somewhere nice, one a bigger holiday, a week-ten days somewhere interesting, possibly Barcelona. So I want to save up for those. The other is to get us a television. We rent one at the moment, and I’d rather that money was going towards other things. So buy something at least as good as we rent, nothing too flash, and sort it out. I might do this first, as I have christmas and birthdays to go through soon, and any presents given in the form of money can go towards that.

Okay, one more, which is just generally to spend a little less time wasting time online, and to write and learn a little more. And that is it for what I am going to cast-iron guarentee I am going to do.

I would like to try and smoke a bit less, drink a bit less, and exercise a bit more. And will try. But the above are my absolute aims

Feels like a long heavy weekend, even though it wasn’t at all for me. Hid out and left the rest of the world to it all. Put the christmas tree up, decked the hall etc. Also learnt what happens to christmas decorations when you vacuum to close to them.

Big news of the weekend was that there was a massive explosion at a fuel depot in Hemel Hempstead. Probably within about 10 miles or so of my parents. I gave them a call pretty much as soon as I found out, just to check they were okay. To explain, they reckon this was the biggest explosion in peacetime Europe, the blast was heard for 100 miles around, and the smoke and fumes were massive, and were blowing right over them. Anyway, their response was “we didn’t even hear it, we were still pissed from Dad’s christmas do”. Parents, there 🙂

Couple of strange things thus far today. Have been asked to work on something obscure today that I randomly started reading up on tonight. And was looking through my blog entries for something, and found a couple of pieces of writing (more writing than blog postings) that I didn’t actually remember posting. Not a problem, its stuff I meant to get round to, it was just that I wasn’t aware I had.

Okay, so as promised, here is a little list of the extensions I use presently for Firefox.

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager. I find it particularly useful when I am researching a project for work, and want to gather all the links together, and be able to access them from several computers (in the course of my normal day, I use four different computers, so perhaps this is more useful to me than most people). This extension helps me post links very quickly, rather than having to cut and paste the url to a page on the del.icio.us site. Incidently, to see my current bookmarks, go to Flotsky’s del.icio.us bookmarks

FasterFox
FasterFox is designed to speed up Firefox even more (it is already pretty nifty compated to Internet Explorer), and uses a few tricks to prefetch links on the page you are on. Also has a handy little display on the status bar which shows how long the page has taken to load, and which can also be right-clicked to clear the cache (both of which come in handy for doing web development)

Fireftp
Guess what? This is an ftp client for Firefox. I like having several elements of functionality within firefox, so I don’t have to keep opening and closing different applications. I haven’t yet found a good IM client for firefox, but that would sit inside here wonderfully (however I have found a webpage that does, more on that soon). Ideally, I would have two programs open at work, Firefox and Eclipse. I’m actually getting pretty close to having that rigged up, I now do all my sql, html, perl, cgi, version control and a few other things in Eclipse, and can do quite a bit in Firefox. Like ftp.

Greasemonkey
Possibly my favourite Firefox extension (yes I have one. yes I am aware this is pretty sad. read the rest of the blog, it isn’t exactly out of character). Uses javascript to modify webpages. That, essentially is it. The beauty is in what can be done using this. There are now thousands of scripts out there, many of which fix issues with popular websites, add functionality, make them look different, or just remove things you don’t need. Absolutely bloody marvellous.

Adblock
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Saves loading time, lets you miss out on content you never needed. Wonderful.

And that will do for now. There are others, and I may well add to this entry over time.